Diaries of Exile - Softcover

Yannis Ritsos

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1935744585 ISBN 13: 9781935744580

Publisher: Archipelago Books, 2013

Synopsis

Called 'the greatest poet of our age' by Louis Aragon, Yannis Ritsos is a poet whose writing life is thoroughly entwined with the contemporary history of his homeland, Greece. Nowhere is this more apparent that in Diary of Exile, a series of diaries-in-poetry written by Ritsos between 1948 and 1950, during Greece's Civil War, while a political prisoner on the island of Limnos and later at the infamous camp on the desert island Makronisos. The poems offer glimpses into the quiet violence of prison life and the struggle to maintain humanity through language.

About this title

About the Author

One of Greece's most prolific and widely translated poets, Yannis Ritsos (1909-1999) was born in Monemvasia. He lost his mother and an older brother to tuberculosis when he was young, and later contracted the disease himself. A lifelong, committed Communist, he fought in the Greek Resistance to the Axis occupation, sided with the Communists in the Greek Civil War, and subsequently spent years in detention centers and camps for political prisoners. The dictatorship of 1967-1974 landed him in internal exile yet again. Despite these many obstacles, Ritsos wrote more than a hundred volumes of poetry, plays, and translations. In 1976 he was awarded the Lenin Peace Prize.

Karen Emmerich's translations from the Greek include books by Margarita Karapanou, Amanda Michalopoulou, Ersi Sotiropoulos, and Vassilis Vassilikos. Her translations of Poems (1945-1971) by Miltos Sachtouris was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry. She has received translation grants and awards from PEN, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Modern Greek Studies Association. She is on the faculty of the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Oregon.

Edmund Keeley is the Charles Barnwell Straut Professor of English Emeritus and the Director Emeritus of the Creative Writing Program at Princeton University. His collaborative translations of the modern Greek poets, including C. P. Cavafy and the Nobel laureates George Seferis and Odysseas Elytis, received the PEN/Ralph Manheim Medal for Translation, and his translations of Yannis Ritsos earned him the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award of the Academy of American Poets and the First European Prize for the Translation of Poetry. In 1999 he received an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Edition details

• Publisher: Archipelago Books
• Publication date: 2013
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1935744585
• ISBN 13: 9781935744580
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 120